BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter One
The Athenians had no word for a ‘bribe’, no noun that signified that something—
whether a gift, a tip, a wage, perquisite or inducement—was a ‘bribe’. They had only the
word dōron (plural dōra), which should always be translated as ‘gift’. This is not to say
that the Athenians had no concept of bribery; clearly they did, as witnessed by the verbs
dōrodokeō (“receive bribes”), dekazō (“bribe”) and the noun dōrodokia (“bribery”). Nor
is it to suggest that the Athenians euphemistically described all ‘bribes’ as ‘gifts’—they
did not. Rather, when the Athenians wanted to mark something linguistically as bribery,
they did so through context, usually with a verb or attendant prepositional phrases; they
never marked the noun, the ‘bribe’ itself. 28
Classicists regularly complicate this picture by claiming that the Athenians in fact
used the same word dōra to denote both gifts and bribes, but this idea is untenable. 29 On
their view, if an Athenian wanted to talk about any ‘bribes’ given or received, she would
have used the word dōra or, occasionally, lēmmata (“takings”), and context would have
dictated whether the dōra were ‘gifts’ or ‘bribes’. 30 But if context always indicated that
something was a bribe, it is curious to assume that, nevertheless, the word dōra continued
to denote an explicit ‘bribe’ on its own. By analogy, note how, whereas we might
distinguish ‘dog’ from ‘animal’ either by using distinct words (‘dog’, ‘animal’) or by
28 On the vocabulary of Greek bribery, Harvey (1985: 82-9) is indispensable and see further below. Here, it
is telling that when the Athenians did use a noun for “a bribe” (dwrodo/khma), not only was it
exceptionally rare—attested once in Comedy (Pl. Com. fr. 119K)—but its meaning was also not clearly
defined as a “bribe” given or received. It sometimes referred, instead, to an instance of bribery: e.g. Dem.
18.29, 31.
29 It would be entirely unexpected for the same word—whether dōron or lēmma—to connote, on its own,
dramatically opposite meanings within a language, particularly given the social and political significance of
a concept like bribery. After all, having the same word denote both ‘gift’ and ‘bribe’ would create a
tremendous amount of confusion; we would expect, instead, that the two would always be distinguished, if
not with different words—just as our word ‘bribe’ is always a marked term distinct from ‘gift’—then by
some other linguistic means.
30 The comments of Harvey are characteristic in this regard: “It is important to stress that dōron means
both what we call a gift and what we call a bribe…one and the same word is used for both types of
transaction” (1985: 82, emphasis retained). Cf. Herman (1987: 85), Lewis (1989: 229), von Reden
(1995a: 94), Taylor (2001: 53).
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